


A Love Letter to Anthropology

by acerbicaftertaste



Category: The Wind City - Summer Wigmore
Genre: Asexual Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, Multi, Non-Sexual Submission, Others to be added - Freeform, Panic Attacks, Sexual Submission, diplomacy and politics and academics, discussion of past trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1242769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acerbicaftertaste/pseuds/acerbicaftertaste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Hikurangi burned, people didn't stop living in fear. Saint shrinks away from shadows and whispers of unrest. Steffan can't stop looking at his future doctorate with dread. Hinewai doesn't know how to keep someone in her life without fighting them. Auta whisper bloody urban legends even when their taniwa protector tells them off. And Tony can smile or gnash her teeth all she likes, but even she can see the problems forming in Wellington's political network.<br/>It would take a minor miracle to solve everything at once, but they've seen stranger things happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> SHITTY UNEDITED VERSION, UPDATED VERY INFREQUENTLY. I AM SO VERY SORRY

Know this: as of this moment, there are 387,983 people living in the city of Wellington.

 

28,233 of them are not human.

 

They have never been studied by an anthropologist. 

 

(That lived, anyway.)

-

After Hikurangi burned, Steffan didn’t have nightmares, exactly. But he’d wake up at 3 a.m. with the world narrowed to a spark and pain flaring up behind his eyes, the weight of the air crushing his chest, half-convinced that the darkness was ash clinging to the walls and grey haze. 

 

Fragments of message.

_it seems_

_coward_

_too much of a coward to_

_a man named Saint_

 

They were softer now, like whispers, but the message had been repeated so often he could tell the phrases from half the breath of a syllable. 

 

He bought three fire detectors. They were kept hidden in a paper bag all the way home, until he put them on his bed and shut the door. He opened the containers with his keys

and installed them all in the ceiling, then stuffed the packaging to the bottom of the trash can. 

 

He didn’t know if seeing the solitary red dots at night made it better or worse. It just provided three gently glowing points of reference when he felt the shadows turn to smoke.  

 

He went to his classes. He took notes, but ideas felt hazy, indistinct, like someone was sitting in front of a lecture hall simply to rehash things he already knew over and over. Particles felt grey, inevitable in their unpredictability. He knew this. Fr-fuck, he had lived through this. Tiny, insignificant particles moved from place to place through forces random and impossible to predict, nonetheless causing change to happen in the universe. What else did he need to know? It all came back to that. There was an infuriating flare of heresy in his chest telling him that he knew the subject better than any of these professors ever would.

 

He made pasta with thick, heady sauce and tuna with cream and homemade bread and set the table for two each night. 

 

His conviction to change majors had lasted a long time, as these things went, before it faltered in the face of practicality. The money that paid for his classes paid for physics, already neatly ordered in a rapidly narrowing fashion towards graduation. 

 

He pictured standing before his parents, or trying in a half-hour phone call to explain that the last four years of their investment in physics were going to be all for nothing.  They would be disappointed. They would try to understand, and they couldn’t, he couldn’t ask them to. There was a place of dullness and ignorance he couldn’t go back to, even if he wanted to, but he’d never force anyone else to leave it.

 

 Or maybe they would be disappointed. Not care. Just refuse, and the last few insane months would vanish like a pipe dream. 

 

He ducked out of class sometimes to dry heave in the bathroom.

 

Even if he began paying for tuition himself, he had no clue how to go about doing it- who he would talk to, what he would need to sign, whether changing courses had even more repercussions than the ones he could think of. He wondered if he had the will to do it at all, or if he would simply crumble the first time an attendant would look at him perplexedly and ask him why. He had a feeling everyone would be… helpful.

 

Sometimes he woke up not from nightmares, but to a disconnected static in his head and a vast, empty space out in the future that swallowed any question he asked. The inside of his head was echoingly quiet, like all the little voices that sounded like him had been hollowed out and he had been left all alone in the silence. 

 

In the end, he made a compromise between himself and the nightmares.

 

 Dr. Gaudin had tenure and thick, dark skin that draped like leather armor, and so was entirely secure in taking off days or weeks at a time to go sailing without fear of consequences.  Steffan had mostly harbored a level of constant irritation at his unpredictability, although Dr. Gaudin had always been good about coming back just in time to push through his assignments, or would pull strings to make it seem like he had. His commentary on Steffan’s dissertation was insightful and merciless and inane. Now he looked over Stefan with concern.

 

But not, Steffan noted soberly, surprise.

 

“You have sixteen credits left.” Dr. Gaudin said gently. “It’s not that much further to go. You could finish it off this year, if you wished. Maybe you could take a weekend? Get drunk, maybe get off. Find a nice date. You are so close.”

 

There were baubles in his office; wooden puzzle cubes and an actual set of those momentum desk toys with the swinging metal balls. In a bowl, a polished-smooth stone figurine carved into the shape of a stingray swam on top a handful of marbles. Things for students to fiddle with, Steffan assumes.  

 

“That’s not what I mean.” Steffan had told him, trolling helplessly for part of the truth. “Not just the physics curriculum, anymore. I need something that’s…. not. Something else to focus on. Just to break it up.”

 

Dr. Gaudin hummed, turned to his computer, and henpecked out a few inquries. 

As it turned out, Steffan actually had a humanities credit he had never gotten around to earning back when he was filling his GEs. 

 

He had a vague memory of taking an art class in his first semester, because Saint had found out somehow and texted him nothing but suggestions of who to paint nude (himself, Saint, endless sent pictures of obscure punk singers) and innuendo about art supplies for weeks. Steffan had ignored him after he had produced his first inked mandala and then his real coursework began to pick up. Saint had sent texts less and less after that.

 

It was suspicious. Of course it was suspicious. Steffan knew how to get through academics with as few speed bumps as possible. If there was _anything_ he could rely on, it was working the system of paperwork and crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s and getting a glowing recommendation from professors in return. Steffan didn’t just forget requirements. 

 

 (Some professors just fell into it by default. People who went from one level to another level and then university and then taught. Not because they had any passion or interest in teaching, but because they had lived their life in a world where everyone was either a student or a teacher, and they ran out of all the roles they could play as a student.  

Somehow Steffan didn’t want to see himself become a teacher. And while it seemed safe-it did seem safe. But standing in a lecture hall and standing over a generation, gently guiding them to make the same choices he had made, felt hopeless in a way that Steffan couldn’t fully elaborate to himself. )

 

 

He chose _World Mythology_ , which was the only entry-level class he could see that didn’t focus on Europe. 

 

 

He hated it. 

 

The first textbook was fine, except it kept insinuating that humans were direct descendants of Neanderthals, who “first created the ritual of myth”.

 

“Look,” he found himself trying to explain in mounting frustration. “Humans and Neanderthals existed during the same time period, but-“

 

“Yes, they were close enough to breed, but that’s my point-“

 

“They had a common ancestor, but it’s a separate evolutionary branch! In no point in time did a Neanderthal evolve into a human! They’re as much a human ancestor as a modern chimpanzee is!”

 

And by the end of the class, he garnered the impression that the professor was convinced he was one of those people who venomently refused to believe that ‘humans came from monkeys’ and plastered stylized fish all over the back of their vans, and was now frostily ignoring him. 

 

Steffan believed in evolution, damn it. Steffan was an advocate of evolution, in fact. The millions of years and innumerable hardships that human ancestors must have developed through that led to a species capable of keeping even someone like Saint alive must have been terrifying. 

 

And it was a testament to how flipped his life had become that just as his studies were becoming more uncertain, Saint was becoming more constant. 

 

Sometimes when Steffan woke up, the couch was mussed and Saint would present him with hardboiled eggs like he had produced them in a French kitchen while Gordon Ramsey had made loving crooning noises. He tossed his legs over the couch and demanded movie selection, and spent long hours underneath boiling hot water in the shower until Steffan had to actually gingerly apply burn cream to his back, and slept on the couch three days out of five. Above all, he ate the food Steffan provided him; because Steffan will never, ever refuse to feed Saint ever again. 

 

Steffan watches carefully what happens when he doesn’t.

 

Saint ate hardboiled eggs (dear god, the noir references, he hoped Saint would latch onto something else soon), peanut butter, bananas, saltines- there was a distinct pattern to what Saint took out of Steffan’s pantry without prompting, and it wasn’t just because Steffan caught Saint trying to boil water in a cast-iron pot once. Using a microwave. 

 

Saint’s diet was cheap, easy to eat, monocolored, and high in energy. It was, to be honest, a very Saint diet. It’s the kind of diet you have when living from dollar to dollar. It was also going to give him scurvy. 

 

Steffan pointedly piled apples and oranges in a fruit bowl in the middle of the kitchen, and, in desperation, bought strange, unfamiliar things from tiny family markets- unusual fish and baked vegetables with names he couldn’t pronounce that he knew Saint would delight in eating them just to see what kind of faces Steffan would make (or to launch into a tirade about just how it was a crime against humanity, or dissect it, Steffan really didn’t care as long as Saint _reacted_ ). 

 

Anything that looked like it cost more than a couple dollars remained untouched until Steffan prompted him, or if they ate together. But there’s no way to tell Saint “You’re living here, you can eat anything you want. Really. Please?” without calling attention to the fact that Saint was, in fact, living there. At which point Saint would _not_ be living there anymore, and go somewhere else. Where Steffan wasn’t. 

 

So Steffan made twice as many grocery trips, and he suspected Saint snuck meals when Steffan was out of the house. Sometimes he found bread rolls in the pockets of Saint’s battered old jacket. Sometimes Steffan slipped in protein bars and nuts to keep them company.

 

He’s sick of noticing it. He’s sick of knowing he never noticed it before. And he’s sick of Saint romanticizing it, romanticizing _everything_. ( _He’s sick of the reminder that he let Saint do this to himself_.)

 

He managed to drop the Mythology class without Saint noticing and picked up something else called _Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion_ , which doubled up Anthropology and Humanities credits, and would probably be a hundred times worse, judging by the title, but at least will be taught by someone who isn’t under the impression he tries to bible-thump at his professors. 

 

He didn’t actually try to keep the specifics of his academics from Saint. It just sort of happened.

 

Steffan had always needed to take a while and think over things before making decisions. The end of high school had been awful: one day he needed to raise his hand to go to the bathroom, and the next, everyone expected him to know the course of his entire adult future. He had panicked. The only thing he had when his counselor leaned across his desk and asked about plans for the future was the affection in Saint’s voice when Steffan had read aloud, and a lovesick longing to know how the world actually worked, and an overwhelming fear of admitting he didn’t know what he wanted. He had stumbled into his major out of momentum. 

 

Saint, of course, always knew that he knew nothing about what he was going to do. He made decisions like a four year old who had decided a bullwhip would be much more effective if covered in butter. 

 

And maybe, a little bit selfishly, he wanted to withhold some aspect of his life from Saint so long as Saint was doing the same to him. Because Saint wasn’t talking much. Well, he talked much, but he didn’t say anything.  He just chattered and made airy gestures and flinched at odd things and curved his body around the lump of scar tissue that was his hand when he thought Steffan couldn’t see him. 

 

It’s like the last four semesters where he had frozen Steffan out all over again, but now he was doing it in the same room, while mumbling out endless metaphors. He almost misses the inadvertent, arbitrary text equivalents-  at least because then if he read ‘you know things, is polyester poisonous if you burn it?’ or ‘ lemon meringue pie is the work of some evil sticky hatebeing of the universe and you should never eat it, steff, ever’, Steffan could fool himself into thinking Saint must be doing something inbetween timestamps, not just wandering around the house like a gosh darn golem animated by pop culture references and the lyric books to every overly painful song he had listened to over and over as a teenager. Now it seems like Saint’s brain was stuck on that keyboard smash of letters that’s still the last message Steffan has from Saint on his phone (they still haven’t gotten around to replacing Saint’s old one), except it’s coming out of his mouth now, and Saint just keeps catching them in time to rearrange them into arbitrary words. 

 

Steffan had seen a long scrape underneath Saint’s sleeve a week ago, and Steffan’s world had gone white for several long minutes before he came to, strangling a tea-towel. 

 

Steffan doesn’t know where Saint goes during the day.

 

Steffan needs to talk to Saint. Otherwise Saint will keep driving himself into the ground and ignoring any indication that Steffan thinks there’s something wrong with either of them until he’s a bloody smear in the ground, or else extrapolate from Steffan breathing wrong that he wants Saint to jump off a bridge.

 

So he’s mostly only staying sane through coffee. Lots and lots of coffee, the drink of hammering your brain with focus until it was forced to latch onto one subject or else get vibrated into pieces. God, he loved coffee. It might make his heart spasm when he climbed stairs but at least he was always too jittery to think about needing to talk to Saint.

 

He doesn’t know how to push, has never known how to confront Saint. If he had the courage to find out how to help, how to say things, to somehow make the bruises and the grandstanding and the blood on his hands and the stumps where his fingers once were not matter anymore…

 

But he’s too much of a coward. 

 

He’s never known how to help his best friend. He’s too much of a coward to commit to anything that might help, because it might make everything so much worse. Saint would rather lose another hand than give away any more of himself than he has to, and Steffan was too much of a coward to lose what piece he had. 

 

-

 

 

Tony _loved_ hotpot.

 

 They were in a little Asian restaurant- the name and the menu were nonindicative of exactly what _kind_ of Asian, but it smelled incredible and had everything from curry to Mongolian barbeque to potstickers. The little booths had dividers that gave the illusion of privacy, and tucked in the corner, Hinewai could eat bleeding pieces of meat with her fingers without attracting attention. 

 

Tony speared a skewer of vegetables and beef and turned it over one of the open flames while broth simmered over the other. It was like tending a tiny campfire! Tony knew better to share the glee of feeling like she was breaking camp with the hobbits if she wanted anything more than a curious stare in return. But it was still fun! 

 

Operation Pop Culture Crash Course was going slowly, because evidently wherever the Patupaiarahe went when they weren’t seeking true love (Hinewai still wouldn’t go into deep detail about what exactly they did day-to-day for all that time) they didn’t have exposure to anything- not to passing references of Bond movies or Harry Potter or anything. 

 

She had expected at least a sneer when she first brought up Lord of the Rings- it seemed to be a sore subject at best with a lot of the iwi auta- but instead Hinewai had furrowed her brow and asked if that meant there were still nobility here to pay respects to and Tony had immediately started plotting a movie marathon and a trip to Hobbiton.

 

Even getting Hinewai to give the straight lines for internet memes wasn’t as fun anymore.

 

But all and all, it was absolutely _perfect_. Which was good, because this was a date! A real, honest-to-goodness, amazing, perfect date. With a real, amazing, honest-to-goodness, gorgeous, perfect date. Well, okay, she still tended to resort to mind control when at a loss, and there were some miscommunication problems, so Hinewai wasn’t _perfect_ , but they were working on it! The date was going to be _perfect_. They had spent the past three weeks trawling through complaints from local auta who had somehow gotten the impression that after the crisis, Tony was the one to go to for judge and jury for practically everything, especially okaying endless blueprints and policies for the new Hikurangi, so it had better damn _well_ be perfect, or Tony was going to pin the date to the bottom of a nice deep river and snarl at it _until it behaved itself_. 

 

Hinewai blinked at her, a slow, slick glide over pitch-black eyes. “Is there something wrong?”

 

“Perfect,” Tony sighed happily. 

 

Except the restaurant was also, primarily, cheap, which was both incredibly convenient and _necessary_ , which was casting a bit of a shadow over the whole date thing. The iwi auta paid in raw mollusks and fish and favors in exchange for Wellington’s guardian to settle low-level squabbles, but her boat was still gone (a fresh pang of unhappiness), and her savings were rapidly running out. 

 

She hadn’t wanted to think about it, especially not now, because she was being an excellent date and she was sick to death of worrying about things that she just wanted to let _go_. 

 

But it was hard to completely focus on Hinewai’s haughty impression of the spirit living in the town hall building (she was spot on, too, they had mostly felt bland and administrative, and the echoing, empty feeling of a big building with everyone being reverently quiet, and glared like an administrative assistant when you weren’t completely sure of your paperwork, and had the general ferretlike impression of trying to seek out any errors you had made, and Hinewai was getting so good at projecting authority and directing people back to the matter at hand when she noticed Tony getting nervous) when she couldn’t stop running the numbers in her head to make sure she really did have enough to pay at the end of the night.

 

Oh, no, it would be awful, the waiter would be so patient and then maybe annoyed and what would Tony say? What would happen if she didn’t have enough? Taniwha strength was awesome and amazing, but somehow she didn’t think it would help very much doing dishes.

 

“Tony,” Hinewai said, with a note of mild alarm. “Whatever you are doing, stop it.”

 

“What?” 

 

Fire flared around Tony’s fingers and she squeaked, tugging the skewer away from the burner. 

 

“Ohmygosh, I’m sorry! Bad fire! Fire is bad!”

 

Hinewai frowned, as though spontaneously combusting was a confusing and slightly worrying human habit she didn’t understand yet. 

 

“I like things better when you are happy.” she offered, patiently ignoring Tony blowing furiously at her skewer. 

 

 “I _am_ happy!” 

 

Hinwai frowned and reached over, smoothing an errant frizz of hair over Tony’s scalp. Hinewai’s fingers were cold against her skin, and slightly slick from handling raw meat. “I like it more when you are smiling and also happy, then.”  

 

Tony felt herself flush, just because it was that impossible for her to be smooth. Oh, she was buggering it up. She was so buggering it up, but it didn’t matter, because Hinwai _liked_ her, and so she could bugger it up all she liked.

 

“I thought you didn’t like the smiling.”

 

“Yes. It is…cute.” 

 

Tony was _proud_ of teaching Hinewai ‘cute’. She had mostly achieved it by showing her pictures of baby turtles and puppies and then got distracted by several hours of cat videos, and although she suspected the fae drew the concept more along the lines of ‘something so frail and inexplicably harmless that I can’t register it as a threat and so am very confused’, it was close enough to the human definition that she counted it a win. 

Tony started peeling the burnt bits off of her skewer. 

 

“I’m not sure how I’m going to make rent this month.” she sighed. 

 

She was suddenly on the other end of Hinewai’s terrifying ‘I am an osprey and you are a tiny delicious-moving minnow’ glare, and Tony dropped her skewer with a squeak. 

 

“But we’ve been working for weeks,” Hinewai said coldly. “Has no one been repaying you?”

 

“No, no, that’s not it!”

 

Hinewai had developed a severe possessive streak every time she thought someone was trying to cheat Tony. Evidently the embargo on mindfucking had translated into an embargo on anyone trying to undermine her. 

It sort of adorable, like a tiny fae chihuahua growling whenever someone took a step too close, but it also meant Hinewai was actually putting effort into analyzing Tony’s human standards lessons and that was _so good_. 

 

She’d be thrilled to return the favor, but Hinewai was still so closemouthed about her life before she came to Wellington, no matter how much Tony encouraged her to talk. The only indications Hinewai gave of what would make an patupaiarhe comfortable were when Tony was working as a mediary at the Hikurangi, and it wasn’t exactly things like ‘it makes me uncomfortable when…’ than it was ‘if you feed someone this, they will die, like super-dead die’. 

 

“It’s a barter system, they’ve been giving us things other than money.”

 

“Is that not payment enough?”

 

Tony wasn’t going to argue with that, because it was, and her grocery bills certainly weren’t going to be a problem for a while so long as she never got tired of seafood. 

“I can’t trade fish for rent,” she sighed. 

 

She paused. 

 

“Wait.” Tony leaned as much as she could over the burner and narrowed her eyes at her girlfriend. “How have you been affording your apartment, anyway?” 

 

Hinewai shifted.

 

“Don’t tell me you’re _still_ -

 

“…I might do the same for you, if you decided I might?” she said hopefully. 

 

Tony gave a glare that said no, I am going to ignore you ever implied you’re keeping your apartment through magical coercion, missy, and you better make sure it’s not necessary real soon, and Hinewai sighed, picking at her side of beef as though Tony was hopeless. 

 

“We,” Tony declared, “Need to go _job hunting_.”

 

Hinewai gave her a dubious look.

 

“Like when we were hunting for the killer?”

 

“No, not like that. More like-“

 

“When we were hunting for… dates?”

 

“Yeah!”

 

“Tony?” Hinewai said, gently. “I do not think you are very good at hunting.” 

 

Tony deflated and rubbed at her forehead. There was tension all along her neck and shoulders and she might need a new pillow or something, or maybe stop falling asleep in a pile of her most comforting plushies at night (which was distressingly shrinking, because sometimes she woke up and they had been shredded by worrying taniwha claws), because if Hinewai wasn’t there with distractingly cold hands, Tony’s head started spinning in an unhappy spiral of _money, money, money, fuck_. 

 

And it was honestly tempting to let someone else take care of this latest (really big!) problem, and not tell Hinewai that she had to move out of her apartment or else stop

enchanting the poor damn landlord because, really, who is it hurting? It would be so easy just to let Hinewai make the problem go away, and forget about solutions that were ethical. Or kind.  

 

But she was the taniwha protector! She was supposed to handle things now! 

 

“Okay, no hunting. What do you want to do, Hinewai?”

 

The patupaiarahe inspected her over the table, eyes narrowed to dark, deep slits. But graciously she decided not to push and answer the question lurking underneath, and stood in a single smooth motion, flicking off the burner. 

“I would like dessert. I will pay.” 

 

Outside, Hinewai walked several blocks, head swiveling as she inspected the street and little alcoves between, making disdainful noises occasionally, before she found whatever it was she wanted. She pushed Tony into a bench, glaring at her until Tony sat down. She nodded once when Tony had settled to her satisfaction, and then turned away. Tony stifled a giggle. 

 

There was an open corner on the other side of the street, an area broad and flat with a raised area of greenery and a handful of benches, more than enough room for several strangers to loiter without violating each others’ personal space, and that was where Hinewai set up a place to busk. She was a cutting figure on the brink of performance, pale and severe, cloth draping everywhere but her face and her fingers, and the curtain of her hair covered even those.  Tony watched, knees brought up to sit on between her and the cold bench, and a few passerby dwindled just based on Hinewai’s presence even before she brought the pipe around her neck to her lips. 

 

The music began distant and wavering like mountains on the horizon. Sharp, but far, far away. It quivered in melancholy, and a passing businessman slowed, hesitatingly, as though afraid to show interest. The crowd grew. Tony was unsure what actually caused people to stop- Hinewai, or the music, but the music was what made them stay. 

 

Then Hinewai’s dark eyes curved in mischief. On her next breath came something unlike any koauau Tony had ever heard before.

 

It reminded of a penny whistle she had heard once, at a bluegrass festival, if the player had maybe made _a pact with a being from beyond the veil_ , or something done with electronics who didn’t have to worry about human limitations like _breathing_. It was leaping and dancing like a living thing, like boiling water leaping off of snow, then flowing into breath and wind, then gently, gradually slowed and wavered softly into the distant and haunting awareness of a dangerous thing, then tripped into eager and generous life again. It stabbed clouds, it drove down deer until they collapsed into exhaustion and then ripped them to shreds, it pulled wind to the earth and danced up lightning like an instantaneous escalator, it shattered ice and then cast the pieces onto stone until the air was filled with cold glitter. 

 

She held them there, entrenched on the cold air and Tony felt herself drawn, leaning forward, filling her chest like the steam of tea or the smell of fresh bread did, like you could _live_ on it, sustained for however long it sang, and it tingled along her skin when it swooped and dove with the pitch.

 

Tony’s fingers were going numb and her heart was pounding with awe when the crowd eventually dissipated, and Hinewai had lifted the flute away from her lips, looking breathless but glowing with victory.

 

Tony couldn’t keep away any longer, and Hinewai watched her approach with dark, cautious eyes. 

 

“It’s not enchantment.” said stiffly. Her lips were pale from the cold, and Tony wanted to kiss them silly until they gained a little color. “I have spent years playing. I am good.” 

 

Tony couldn’t even pretend not to look at her with helpless fondness.

 

“I know.”

 

 Tony had developed her senses over her time at the Hikurangi and they came naturally, now. She could feel the city’s breath on her ankles when she stood in front of a storm drain and knew the tingle of holy places and when Hinewai’s power pulled away from her body. 

 

Tony’s cheeks hurt from grinning with pride.

 

This wasn’t any magic but that of proud, long-developed skill and charisma, of someone who loved their work, so familiar, and the tools they had crafted themselves, intensely personal and competent. And then there had been a flair that was all Hinewai, grand and baroque and slightly grating against the rest of the tune, competing against the enveloping major key, that had compelled her audience into nothing but acknowledging that I Exist. 

 

“That was so amazing.”

 

Tony gave into the urge, and did indeed kiss Hinewai silly. Her lips warmed up against hers, and Hinewai made a pleased sound into her mouth. 

 

With an abrupt shift, Hinewai’s cool hands slid into Tony’s hairline, and she licked into her mouth, dominating with the click of teeth, her breath tasting like cold air and raw beef. It was sharp and perfect, and Hinewai caught Tony’s lip like the snap of chill air on a winter’s day. Tony pulled away, breathing shallowly and her fingers still numb, and Hinewai licked Tony’s nose in playful triumph. 

 

 

With Hinewai’s fistful of bills and coins (one had been a tenner and had a phone number written on, which Tony gleefully ignored). they searched out a café that did self-serve frozen yogurt. 

 

Hinewai went straight to the front counter and stared up at menu, head cocked and looking personally insulted at having to deign herself to figuring out color-coding. 

The perplexed cashier caught her eye.

 

 “Did you want me to list flavors for you?”

 

Hinewai’s eyes flickered to the cashier, to the menu, and back, and narrowed decisively, pinning the cashier in place.

 

“Yes.”

 

“We have chocolate, chocolate mint, raspberry, brownie explosion, kiwi, strawberry, cheesecake, coconut, mocha, tropical paradise, cookies and cream, salted caramel, pistachio, mango, classic tart, cappuccino, and blueberry banana.” he rattled off in one breath. “You can get it in a cup, a cone, or waffle cone, which can be dipped or sprinkled. You can make any of our yogurt flavors into a smoothie or a frappichino, or into a sundae for an extra two dollars. We have fifty-two toppings and the price of your purchase will be determined by net weight.”

 

He paused, then added, “Only cash, no credit, sorry.” 

 

Hinewai stared, blank-faced and frozen in maintaining eye contact with the poor human across the counter, black into black. The cashier looked bored, a suitable defense mechanism for avoiding the panic of nothing he was offering mollifying the terrifying fae lady. 

 

Anyone who hadn’t spent the last few weeks at her hip wouldn’t know the tiny indications that Hinewai had no idea what any of it meant and was floundering in indecision. 

 

“Can we get some sample cups?” Tony chirped, breaking them out of their impasse. 

 

The cashier ducked underneath the counter to provide them and Tony steered Hinewai away from the counter with tiny paper cups in hand. 

 

“All right!” she said cheerfully, waving at the wall of chrome machines. “This is self-serve. You take the little cups-“ she held one up triumphantly. “And pull the lever so only a little comes out so you can taste it and see if you like it. Then you can fill one of the bigger cups with whatever you want.”

 

Hinewai took the tiny cups Tony pressed on her, shamefaced and hackles up.  

 

“Would have figured it out.” she muttered, curled over her them. 

 

“I know! You’re actually really good at this. If I suddenly got dumped in, I don’t know, Germany, I wouldn’t be this accepting of weird people and weird customs even it was completely normal for them, I’d be losing my mind because nothing was familiar-

 

“Here, look-“ she whipped around and produced a swirl of pistachio, “Try this!”

 

She held out tiny paper cup, hanging hopefully in the empty air between them.

 

Hinewai just looked at it a moment, then bent down, hair falling like a curtain around the offering. Her tongue darted out and deftly lapped up the swirl of green. Her eyes flickered to meet Tony’s, suddenly coy, and her lips closed around Tony’s fingers. A shiver rippled up her arm.

 

“Good?” Tony asked weakly.

 

Hinewai hummed, pleased, half-closed eyes like a tiger watching a baby sheep doze.

 

“Good.”

 

She swept away with her with new confidence to tackle the machines and Tony leaned against the wall, suddenly weak at the knees and more than willing to let Hinewai experiment with every flavor. Hinewai made _adorable_ faces at some of the fruit ones and it took her a whole five minutes of hovering between the machines before she smashed as many flavors together as she could with fierce dignity. 

 

Tony eventually had to drag her away from the wall of toppings before Hinewai’s multicolored, many-textured monstrosity could topple over from its own weight. 

 

Only once Hinewai had paid and they sat down, in a cozy alcove near the window, and, the cashier having popped in some blaring headphones, that she inspected their purchases warily. Something had occurred to her a little too late. 

 

“Is this… okay for you to eat?”

 

“Yesh-“ Hinewai said through a mouthful of moochi.

 

“Are you… sure? It’s probably been messed with in a fuckton of factory processes.”

Tony had watched _How It’s Made_. Anything made in a chain fast food place was probably as much of a pinnacle of human distance from nature as fire was, at least, and she was kicking herself for not thinking of it sooner. 

 

Hinewai peered into her cup suspiciously. She rolled it slowly around in in her mouth, as though checking for sudden acid burns before swallowing. Hesitantly, she said,

 “It is tied more into fire, I think. Even processes before cooking could be extremely complicated.”

 

“Good to know! We don’t need to go on a raw foods diet, at least.” 

 

Hinewai went back to deconstructing her bowl with intense concentration, and they ate in comfortable silence for a while. 

 

“You feel happier while talking about your family. You should contact them.”

 

Tony blinked, startled, and broke away from her comfortable reverie of watching people pass by the front windows of the café. 

 

Hinewai looked away from her yogurt and turned her eyes on her, large and dark like puddles on asphalt. She fiddled with the spoon and the edge of the plastic cup, chasing an errant chocolate chip. 

 

“What? Oh, Hine. I am happy, I promise. It’s just stuff you have to deal with, like taxes and water weight and tight shoes. I’m sorry I brought it up.” 

 

“It would have made me happy.” Seeing Tony’s blank look, she clarified, “If my sister had contacted me after she left.”

 

Tony made a distressed noise and crumbled under the power of sisterly love. Sisterly love! Flower crowns and telling secrets and blood pacts and oh, no, Hinewai had always spoken about her sister in the past tense, hadn’t she? Did Hinewai ever even get to see her again? Did her sister die with her mortal lover? Oh, no! Oh, she didn’t want to think that, that shit was _sad_!

 

Achievement Unlocked: You Cannot Stand Up To Your Girlfriend’s Sad face! 

 

Hinewai beamed. 

 

Tony’s phone was lagging along- partly because of water damage and age, but partly because she was so bad at remembering to charge it and it was perpetually hovering at around 10% power whenever she wanted to use it, but it had enough charge for a quick phone call.

 

Tony took a deep breath and chose to interpret Hinewai’s hovering in the edge of her vision as a display of emotional support, which she could do so long as she pretended not to see Hinewai stealing her toppings. 

 

After three rings, her mother’s voice came on with the sound of a great clatter of things being moved out of the way.

 

“Tony!”

 

“Wow, that was a record,” Tony said, startled. 

 

“Well, I’ve been worried, sweetheart. You haven’t made a peep since we last talked and

of course Rangi started up with all kinds of horror stories about people reacting badly a few hours after the call, and I have fifty big ones riding on you handing it just fine. I had your cousin set up one of those electronic GPS buttons to keep better tabs on the phone so I wouldn’t miss it this time.” 

 

“Those… actually work?”

 

“Well, no. But I have been trying to get better about carrying it on me.”

 

Tony laughed absently. 

 

“How are you doing? Is everything all right?”

 

“Ma, you can keep your fifty dollars. It’s all okay. I’ve- you know.”

 

“Good, maybe you can teach us old’uns something. The neighbors and I have been arguing about whether or not taniwha have five fingers.”

 

“We do.”

 

“Good!”

 

There was a brief pause. Tony heard the sound of chopping against wood- the cutting board, beat-up old laminated bamboo, she remembered, and she had carved in the Superman shield with a switchblade when she was ten. The stab of homesickness was surprisingly painful. 

 

“I’m glad you called first, sweetheart, because I would have in a few days anyway. Rangi did made a few calls and there’s someone on his side of the family that says they want to talk to you about all this. Could have contacted me a few days earlier, is all I can say.” 

 

Tony felt a huff of laughter tear out. There was interference on the phone, or something, because there was a buzzing in her ears and the screen looked blurry. 

 

“That’s great, Ma.”

 

“Sweetheart?” The sound of chopping paused, and there was a note of concern in her mother’s voice.  “Are you okay?

 

Tissues gently pressed themselves into her hands. Tony lifted her head and Hinewai tapped her cheek at her. Tony lifted her own hand to her face, and her fingers came away wet. She sniffed.

 

“Yeah, I’m okay.” She fought to keep her voice from cracking. The voice on the other line was soft and gentle and suddenly Tony was sitting at the kitchen table while the haze of a childhood nightmare dissipated while her mother bickered with the stove and made her hot chocolate. Neighborhood gossip and the plastic bin full of comics cracked open and it was only a dream. “I just- a lot has happened lately. Who is it?”

 

“I’m not sure. Rangi thinks she may be his second cousin. Sweetheart? You said that you had someone who was helping you through this. Can you talk to them? Have they been helping you at all?”

 

“No, he-“ Tony felt throat close up around the words.  “He can’t.” 

 

Her mother’s voice turned severe and 15% more urban on a syllable. “Did he lie to you? Or leave? Do we have to break kneecaps? We have a bat, I can break kneecaps. Even auta have kneecaps.” 

 

“No, he… something happened, and he died.”

 

The fight in her mother immediately died out. 

 

“Oh, _sweetheart_.” she murmured.

 

“I don’t… really want to talk about it on the phone.” 

 

“That’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Okay? Right?”

 

She startled as Hinewai squeezed her shoulder, looking uncertain, and Tony sniffed, gave her a watery smile. Her mother had never actually been very good at straightforwardly emotional things. Maybe she and Hinewai could bond.  

 

“Can I come home this weekend?” she blurted.

 

“Of course, Tony. You can always come home. We’re here for you. We can do a big fancy wake, like that bit in _Civil War_.” 

 

“You can call that aunt, and we can talk, and-“ hesitated, glanced at Hinewai. “You can meet my girlfriend?”

 

Hinewai blinked, but then nodded, once.

 

The woman on the other side of the line shrieked. Hinewai’s eyes squeezed half-shut in surprise and her ears flicked, like a cat’s when they had heard something too shrill.

 

Tony giggled, wiping away tears.

 

“Well, you chose what a time to spring that, Mark 1!” her mother said reproachfully. “You’re going to give me an ulcer, making my heart swing like that!” 

 

Tony found a smile on her face.

"I don't think that's how ulcers work."

And they made small talk, as much as she could make small talk without actually saying the sentence ‘I met my girlfriend when she coerced me into a friendship when I was vastly uninformed and sort of has mind control abilities’ because she didn’t actually want to cry in public and Hinewai probably could get hurt by a bat, at that. 

 

When she hung up, Hinewai had something tender in her face, and stroked her forehead where it was too warm. 

 

“Thank you.” Tony mumbled, the honesty feeling painful in her chest, and buried her face into Hinewai’s hair. It smelled like cold concrete and damp cotton.

Hinewai simply made a haughty noise, as though it would have been an insult to do any less, then carded her absent fingers through Tony’s hair while she stole Tony’s pistachio-with-almond bits sundae. 

 

“Love you.” 

And she did, like she loved gentle days on the sea and puppies and magical mocha whipped cream frappichinos with precisely five pumps of caramel and the way saltwater taffy went sticky and thick in the back of your throat on hot days. 

 

“I know.” 

 

“Star Wars next.” Tony huffed, her breath displacing Hinewai’s curtain of hair. Strands threw off glimmers of color in the cheap electrical lighting. “And then Star Trek, because Star Trek is so much _better_.”  


	2. Wake up, sleepyhead. It’s time for the world to end.

The clock glowed 2:46 when Tony finally kicked off her covers and padded barefoot out of her room. 

The light of a late-night program, mostly blocked by Hinewai’s body, did interesting things to the cast of her back. The gaunt knobs of her spine glowed, ribs of shells held up against a distant electric light. She perched on the back of the sofa like a gargoyle, sharp shoulder blades jutting like wings as she fixated on the screen. Blobs of dark shadows under one rib, pale implications of another.

She had a pair of boxer shorts on and nothing else, and Tony gave a sleepy nod as she doublechecked that the curtains were still closed.

The floorboards were cool and dry, and the house dark, and it was easy like breathing to wrap her arms around Hinewai’s back. Hinewai’s skin was cooler, refreshing against where Tony’s was still overly warm from bed. There were goosebumps on the shoulder beneath Tony’s cheek. and the chill was soothing the gummy way her eyes were prickling.

Hinewai’s spine curved like a human’s couldn’t, under Tony’s abdomen, and the slick play of back muscles were as alien as the way Hinewai’s limbs folded neatly about her, like wings made out of bone. Alien, and cool, and strange, and perfect.

Hinewai gave her a low hum of greeting without glancing away from the television, and reached over her shoulder to adjust how Tony was plastered across her back. More of her weight settled on Hinewai’s back and the edge of the couch, less on her feet, so that Tony was almost suspended between two points. The palm of her feet on the ground and Hinewai’s skin on her skin, her thighs leaning heavily into the back of the couch. Hinewai’s hand fisted in the back of her sleeping shirt, practically holding her aloft one-handed. Floating, where her mind was floating between sleep and consciousness.

A history program was on. She could see it playing blearily through one eye. Thankfully not one with the ancient aliens or the Bermuda triangle, but Tony was pretty suspect of any supposedly educational television once they stopped regularly showing baby animal documentaries.

She closed her eyes and turned into Hinewai’s shoulder again. The documentary droned. Knees bent into the back of the couch dug further into the upholstery. Grateful for it, because her limbs felt leaden and a buzz of exhaustion was folding over the back of her eyes. Keeping balance was practically unconscious. An imperceptible swaying on the pads of her feet as she breathed.

In and out, and her entire body had an immeasurable flex, the microscopic swell of the ocean when it was still as glass, keeping the reflections aquiver. Absolute returns. The swell under and the swell over evened out over infinity until it was just stillness. Hinewai smelled like glass and cold, and the entire world was wavering.

A beam of warmth hit on her face and Tony pulled away, screwing up her face. She groaned and rolled over.

Sometime during the night, she had migrated to lying on the couch with her head in Hinewai’s lap, although she didn’t remember when. She peered up, and sure enough, there was a glint of sunlight mustering through the black-out curtains. They made the apartment dim, even in the middle of the day, but at least Hinewai didn’t get sunburns indoors anymore.

Hinewai, for her part, acknowledged Tony was awake by patting her hair absently and turning up the volume on the television by a few ticks. 

Hinewai was still clear-eyed and looked none the worse for wear for watching what must have been hours of late-night documentaries. She fixed Chinese-American immigrants laboring on the screen with the same slightly perplexed, distant curiosity as she did during their Sex in the City marathons. Lucky her. Tony would have probably taken the embargo on cooked foods if it meant she never had to deal with bags under her eyes again.

After how many weeks, and she still couldn’t quite guess if patupaiarhe just didn’t need to sleep that much, were naturally nocturnal, or if Hinewai was just an insomniac. Nightime television binges didn’t seem to affect Hinewai badly, in any case, although it was another story for Tony’s cable bill. Helping Hinewai adjust to culture shock was excellent, but at some point Tony was going to have to give her a list of nighttime chores to do.

 She tapped the side of Hinewai’s thigh to break her of the glamorous Industrial Revolution reverie.

 “You look like you should be taking notes.” she said, yawning.

Hinewai just made a scoffing sound and ignored her in favor of steam engines and nonexistent regulations.

 “I’m thinking yogurt and the rest of the tuna and egg. You?”

“I want a herring.” Hinewai declared, not lifting her furrowed concentration.

Tony peeled herself off to pad into the kitchen, stretching out the sleeping-on-the-couch cricks on the way. Ow, that foot sure was asleep.  _Gosh,_ she needed coffee. Like a pound of coffee and twelve squeezes of hazelnut and chocolate. With… the tuna. Interesting combo, but she could dig it.

The tuna had lasted a good two and a half weeks, even with both of them working on it. The initial hunk of flesh had been able to touch one side of her dining room table from the other. (Not that her little bachelorette table was anything to sneeze at, but  _still_.) That’s something they never tell you, even if you have a glass-bottom boat and a proud mental encyclopedia of New Zealand things with gills: you might buy tuna in teeny little tins, but full grown adults are flipping  _huge_.

 It had been presented to her, oddly enough, by a group of ponaturi  _tourists_. Tony had stopped them on Cuba Street, half-convinced that she saw a familiar face among the scale-scattered shoulders. By the time Hinewai caught up, wild-eyed and half-armed, they had worked out the misunderstanding and Tony evidently looked so downtrodden that Hinewai had offered to take out the whole group of them to lunch in a nice, non-human-stabby place.

Tony might have gotten a little dewy-eyed and made sure they all knew where the closest shelters and bus stops and good long-travel currents were, and there might have been some hugs. And she might have given them some of her dolphin jerky.

But nobody could ever prove it but Hinewai, who only made sounds about why do they have to adopt tadpoles,  _really_ , when they were out of earshot. (A good few more blocks than Tony would have given, honestly. She bet their out-of-water hearing was about as good as hers was.)

Luckily for her, fish was kind of hard to mess up cooking, because her kitchen didn’t have a ton of elbow room and knocking something over in the room of knives and fire was generally a bad thing. But Tony was proud of her little kitchen! It was tiny, but it was practical, and she had taught herself how to use it! ‘Taught’ being the operative word, because it turned out that spatial awareness when you move from a rural house on the South Island to an apartment in a city was very much a  _learned_  skill. She had the bruises on her hips to prove it.

            Well. That was where  _most_  of the bruises came from, anyway.

            Tony let herself hum the humming song of the happily laid as she chopped up the tuna. That was her new favorite part of cooking, the chopping. The smooth thunk of the knife parting flesh gave her inner taniwha a thrill of satisfaction. She really wanted to try slicing with her bare claws, sometime, just to see how much control she had, but Tony the Taniwha definitely wouldn’t fit in the kitchen, and Hinewai would just smile knowingly at her about the whole thing.

            Sigh. Would still be fun. Maybe try slicing up some tires in an empty field or something.

            She seared the tuna in a bit of olive oil and garlic powder, and poached an egg in the other pan with the leftover juices. She was piling it all on a bit of toast and searching for their cherry yogurt when cool hands slid around her waist. Tony smiled.

            “Did you decide I was more interesting than your show?”

            Hinewai sniffed curiously over her shoulder, eying Tony’s breakfast plate. She could huff over cooked food all she liked, but Tony noticed how Hinewai’s nostrils twitched. If she couldn’t get a job touring after all this, she should go into selling the patupaiarhe bacon-scented candles.

            “They stopped for commercials.” There’s a certain amount of distain in how Hinewai reached over her shoulder to steal a spoonful of yogurt. Hinewhai hated commercial breaks about as much as she respected their cunning. She alternated between pointing out all of their techniques out loud in divisive tones, and then muting the television and leaving the room in order to refuse them even the opportunity to challenge her. She was getting better at timing it so she came back just when the show restarts, but Tony bet Hinewai would be delighted with a DVR machine if she could afford one. 

The way Hinewai sucks at her stolen prize, her hand braced on Tony’s shoulder, sent shivers up Tony’s spine.

With a huff, Tony pushed her off to retrieve Hinewai’s herring from the fridge. Hinewai disengaged long enough to liberate it from Tony and to help clean and debone it with her bare hands.

Laying it out on the cutting board, Hinewai teased out long, delicate ribs. Hooking in, right underneath the jaw, to pull out the bright spilling organs in short, sharp tugs. Occasionally she sucked the raw juice from the tips of her fingers, and made pleased noises. She really was far too lovely for anyone to be, mouth and fingers pale and red, teeth sharp in the wrong places and scraping the clinging flesh off of bone. It was not the description of the next Miss New Zealand, or really, anyone she should be thinking of bringing home to her mum. But.

It was  _Hinewai_. And Tony couldn’t help but be impossibly fond of her dark-eyed, clumsily inhuman companion. It was like if a cat had gotten crossed with a praying mantis and a leafblower, and then was left to live amongst a colony of seagulls.

It was only when Hinewai caught her looking and grinned that Tony realized she was up to something. That was the kind of grin that led to bruises on the hips.

Hinewai caught her eye, she flicked her tongue out across the pad of her thumb and flashed half-lidded eyes. Tony rolled hers. Hinewai had an  _agenda_ , and they had now enacted the unspoken rules that today’s game was to see which would be completed first: breakfast, or heavy petting on the couch.

            Tony stole Hinewai’s heavily-gutted herring before Hinewai could peel it apart into inedible mush in the name of flirting, and drizzled it with lime juice. Heat was not the only way of cooking meat, and Hinewai  _was_  going to get a parasite or something at this rate.

Tony was hunting for cilantro and pepper while the herring warmed to room temperature on the stove’s ambient heat when Hinewai sidled up behind her again.

“Stay still.” She said firmly, and carded her fingers through Tony’s hair, still unruly and tangled and utterly a mess of knots because she hadn’t grabbed a comb yet.

Tony sighed. But Tony did.

Hinewai patiently tugged her hands away from the cupboards and steered her away from the counter.

Her fingers were deft and gentle as they undid the couch’s work on Tony’s hair. It was a contrast with the intent, firm way she angled Tony’s skull as she liked.  

Tony really hadn’t meant for mutual grooming to become a regular thing. (It felt a bit like she was in a Tarzan movie. And Tony could rock a loincloth as well as anyone else, but. It was a little too-on-the-nose.) Hinewai liked combs- she actually had one that she had rescued from a craft fair, some kind of carved stone, that she was beamingly proud of- but she didn’t so much like the actual combing. At all. It was a struggle to keep Hinewai from letting her hair get into a matted mess because each session involved a lot of squirming and whining. Eventually Tony had managed to get a soft-bristle brush and use it in combination with her own fingers in a way that Hinewai could sit still for.

And then Hinewai seemed set on returning the favor.

It was almost painfully ironic-feeling, at times, like they were doing each other’s hair in a fourteen-year old boy’s idea of what happened at slumber parties. But it  _was_  nice.

And for a bit she could just enjoy the sensation, wriggling her toes against the tile floor. The satisfying release of tangles tugging at her scalp. Hinewai’s nails scratching at her hairline.

Then Hinewai’s hands slid out of her hair, one thumb brushing gently down her cheek. Tony sighed and closed her eyes, leaning back into Hinewai’s skyscraping strength, immovable and solid against her back. Taking this as permission,  Hinewai started exploring along Tony’s sides, resting hands on her hips, fingers spider-walking nonsense patterns.

When they played this game, Hinewai’s touches always changed from instant to instant- sliding, grasping, a flutter of fingertips turned into firm, proprietary touches, firm, and then soft, skating her ribs, smoothing touches over the softness in her stomach and hips where she carried more weight, feather touches in the slight indent of her hipbones.  _This is mine, and this, and this._

Smooth sweeps from her back to her belly and back, curious, testing. Like perhaps there was something there that Tony wouldn’t let her touch. Like there was something there that Hinewai could find anew.

It was unpredictable, and sometimes inconvenient, and sometimes exasperating, like the time Hinewai spent thirty minutes prodding her bellybutton while Tony was trying to fill out the insurance form for her boat.

Hinewai’s palm slid across the fine hairs along her stomach. Light and cool and so deadly.

 Tony strained to hear music in the soft buzz of cheap flat wiring, because this just shouldn’t feel so  _disarming_. She can’t possibly run warm, just like  _that_ , when Hinewai hardly did anything but just touch her, palms flat, or knuckles rolling, or barely-there fingertips.  Most of the time they were practically  _chaste_ , except when her hands slipped under Tony’s waistband and fingertips dug into the meat of her thigh, or she stared Tony eye to fathomless eye, never breaking, while her thumb rolled over Tony’s bottom lip and the corners of her mouth.

She couldn’t catch the music, not ever again since the first time, but it shouldn’t- it wasn’t even cuddling, or groping. Just touch without ever taking. Just invoking. Gentle, gentle, curious Hinewai with the hungry, hungry touch.

That just went under her shirt.

Tony yelped and jerked away.  _Cold hands!_ Hinewai shifted behind her and made a warning noise, low and content.

_No moving. Right_. Tony bit her lip.

Hinewai hummed in her ear and rolled one nipple between her fingers, and when that got her no reaction, a gentle twist, further and further until she’s rewarded with a stutter in Tony’s breathing rhythm, and moved on. 

She could see Hinewai in the reflection of the kitchen window over the sink. The pale cloud of hair mingling with her own messy curls. One hand splayed on Tony’s stomach to keep her braced against her, the other obscenely vanishing behind Tony’s sleeping shirt. The ruck-up of fabric where Hinewai’s hand was working.

Oh. She was glad she bought black-out curtains. Even if this window  _did_  face out into a wall.

Hinewai’s eyes met hers in the window, and they were softer then they should have been, like Tony was helping with something she couldn’t name. Tony’s pulse was beating, high and tight in her throat.

Hinewai pulled away abruptly, losing patience with whatever goal she was working towards, and switched tracks.

Tony fought not to squirm when one hand trailed along her side, the motion ticklish and light along her ribs. Hinewai paused, then did it again, more intentionally, more playful now, the pitter patter of fingertips zoning in on the areas that made Tony seize up and swear under her breath, twisting away from Hinewai’s fingers.

            Hinewai smiled as Tony lifted her head up and glared, tangles dangling in front of her face like vines.

“I thought I told you not to move.” She murmured thoughtfully. “I wonder what, exactly, would make you understand you should not disobey me.”

Her nipples were tight and aching.  She itched to provide relief herself instead of patiently allowing Hinewai to explore. Hinewai would let her do it, too, if she let the game go on, if she let Hinewai punish her disobedience. 

Hinewai was getting very good at knowing what the best kind of encouragement was.

 Tony smiled.

Hinewai did, too, teeth bright and sharp, bared tight like a snapping bear trap.

 “I have a suggestion.”

Tony’s voice was lower than it was a moment ago. She swallowed to rid it of the slight rumble. She owed it to Hinewai not to crack.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

And in a fluid motion, Tony ducked under Hinewai’s arm and spun out of her reach.  _Quickly, quickly, she has a longer reach than you do_.

“Rongo will be expecting us!” She sang, scooping up the breakfast plates and tugging her pajamas down from where Hinewai had rucked them up.

Hinewai made a sound like a seabird stuck in a clinging plastic bag and grabbed at the back of Tony’s shirt, but Tony dodged behind one of the kitchen chairs. Tony’s skin still tingled, hyper-aware of the morning air.

“No!.” Hinwai barked, indignant. Her eyes were wild-looking, and a sheen of autumny color had risen   “I was going to win!”

“Nu-uh, breakfast first.”

Eyes narrowed, Hinewai swept around the table for a second go. Suddenly Tony was faced with a close-up of Hinewai’s puppy-dog eyes. It lowered her defense long enough for Hinewai to rub up against Tony’s arm like a discontented cat, to nip at her ear and whine. Her arms snaked back around Tony’s chest.

“Rongo will be expecting  _this_.”

 “Rongo isn’t the boss of us!”

“Well, then Rango won’t  _care_  if we’re late.”

Tony pulled away again from the tangle of pale arms, Hinewai stalking her around the obstacle of the table.

_Round and round the mulberry bush, the fairy chased the taniwha-_

“Your herring will get cold, and if I warm it up again, it’ll start cooking.”

Hinewai frowned, visibly debating warm Tony-flesh to warm fishy-flesh.

Tony had her seated and a plate in front of her before Hinewai could decide against the fishy-flesh and plonked down across the table, rattling her silverware with an avid interest in the food.

Hinewai glared.

Tony just glanced back at her with wide-eyed innocence, twirling a spoon through her yogurt. “Would you like the newspaper?”

Hinewai stuffed a forkful of flaking fish in her mouth, wordless. Her dark eyes bored into Tony’s forehead. Hehe. Well, she could have a pouty staring contest with the top of her head, for all Tony cared! There was breakfast to smugly help herself to.

Point goes to Moana!

 

-

The Hikurangi was growing back. There was a brownstone bar area that already had a visible skeleton up-some of it old reused stone, some of it streaked with soot, some of it newly cut wood that smelled of dried sap. Eight massive open-air windows took up most of the walls, and Rongo’s personal contributions were a ring of panels along the very top of the walls.

The rest of them were taking a crash-course in amateur carpentry.

It was actually bare-bones enough to sell some cheap black coffee over a makeshift counter, among other things that were evidently difficult to get a hold of elsewhere in Wellington: a cooler of specifically-treated raw meats, mixtures of powdered bone or grease-caked feathers in a twist of paper, some kind of specialty flour that Rongo sold by the sack.

If all went well, the actual café would be ‘outside’, separate from the structure that held the bar and facilities ; free-standing tables under a drizzly, palm-feathered sky, no walls except for the permeable-looking bush at the forest line, and hills unrolling in the distance.

You could see the faint lines of Wellington in it- where she knew the Jasonville line unrolled, and there was the dragonesque rise of the land where Mt. Victoria was, but crowned by mist instead of smog.

But for now, they were focused on getting the brownstone up and operational. Once the heart was up, then they could focus on making H actually look like a place of glory.

For the first few weeks, Hinewai had been the one in highest demand.

 It was hard to remember, sometimes, because Hinewai spoke better te reo than Tony could (mostly because Tony only kept in practice by talking to little ladies in the market who couldn’t find beans, and watching local soap operas), but Hinewai was an outsider to the Hikurangi- and Wellington- too. Hinewai wasn’t any more special than anyone else here (despite the fact that obviously Hinewai was special everywhere, but Tony knew that was the honeymoon period talking, and the  _special_  wasn’t necessarily good)

When they first started helping to clean out the site of the fire, she hovered behind Tony while Tony was left to cheerfully volunteer them for jobs. She stood on the sidelines, hands shifting from hanging at her sides to picking at threads on her elbow, until Tony directed her to what needed to be done.

Even then, she was detached from the work with a kind of cautious pride. Soot wasn’t supposed to be handled this close, and especially not with others watching.  _These_  others watching.  

Then a hapless librarian had burst into tears after the second solid week of complaints about debris in the air and the noise, products of some phantom construction she had no way of knowing about. A tiny dent had appeared between Hinewai’s eyebrows while the others had argued over soundproofing methods. The next day, the skies of Wellington had been cast into gentle drizzle that tamped down on the sawdust and muffled the sound.

It was the kind that scattered everything with sun-fractured sequins, and for three weeks straight, Hinewai had perched atop the grittily-glittering construction, underneath Tony’s Hello Kitty parasol, steadily working through Tony’s collection of musicals on a second-hand dvd player.

It turned out that being useful was exactly the kind of egobooster that Hinewai needed.

            On the fourth week, Rongo had gently tugged Tony aside and informed her that soggy insulation wouldn’t do anyone any good, and the moisture was being an absolute nightmare on the support beams.  Then Hinewai had gotten shuttled off the roof and the two of them had worked together on a busking routine- of the actually mind-altering magic sort- until Tony could let herself approve. 

Which was why Hinewai was outside, playing music with a strong undercurrent of ‘there are better things to do than stare at a wall, go and get out of this wind bringing in dust’, with a chorus of Tony’s suggested, ‘remember the name of the book you want, go check it out before you forget’; while Tony was inside, doing the heavy lifting of shifting the last of the new foundation in place.

Hinewai had even worked in a little ‘be productive, stay on task, you can do it’, too, the tones of which Tony thought might be being played a little sarcastically.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Tony said, handing Rongo the hammer he was gesturing for from the counter. “And don’t laugh, because it’s a silly newbie question.”

Rongo just hummed inconclusively around the nails between his teeth. He never did really laugh at her stupid questions, but he certainly set up a lot of straight lines and dimpled when others finished them at her expense. Free pastries were his way of laughing at you and patting you on the back at the same time.

Tony almost missed the free laughing-at-you-pastries. She felt like she might never taste anything but sawdust and wet dirt again.

“Why are we doing all of this?” Tony waved at the site in general. There were three stone-skinned workers with hands like rough geodes and a manaia today. It didn’t seem to be so much as helping as watching everything with bright, quick eyes, and jumping from crate to crate. They had to watch the nails to make sure it didn’t pry out the shiny ones.   

Two of the three stonepeople were sipping black coffee out of the heavy line of crates Tony had dragged into place last week. It had been set up in the middle of the space in order to make the place functional for transactions, but would probably be replaced with a more solid counter in the coming days.

 “The old Hikurangi was like walking into a forest. Having that much old growth doesn’t really strike me as something you built with starter kits from Home Depot. Why can’t we just rebuild the Hikurangi with magic?”

It already seemed like the magic was halfway there to reclaiming it. Mist curled around their ankles in the beginnings of the brownstone, like the forest was eager to phase into the city again. It was certainly eager to reap the soils of the charred remains, growth swallowing old stumps and charcoal greedily like so much fertilizer. The rich black ground was peppered with pricks of green.

But Rongo would shoo the saplings poking up from the dirt to the edges of the site again, leaving the broad of the floor loose dirt, little furrows cut into it with their footsteps like they were awaiting crops.

Rongo carefully plucked the nails from his teeth and lined up the next in his panel.

 “We found some pretty major structural damage on the actual building from the fire. You can’t build anything without a solid foundation.” He drove it home in three careful taps,  _ping, ping, ping_. On either side were insets of  _paua_ , abalone shell.  _Eye shell_ , her mum had always told her, and held it up with a dark pebble in the center so it could reflect the light like the white of a disembodied eye. “And I wanted to try something a little different.  Higher canopy. Different soil blends. More solid infrastructure.”

He eyed the pattern of iron nails. “Less flammable materials.”

The nails went back into his mouth, signaling for Tony to take a few moments to consider his words. Probably, a little pointedly, while moving something in the pile of timber for him.

“You’re trying to make it more stable?” Tony hazarded.

Two more nails were in place before Tony got a reply, a rumble of dissatisfaction.

“Was trying too hard to make it where it wasn’t. Old growth can’t just be lain down in the middle of the city. I was too old and too stubborn. Thought it could stand on its own on top without clearing the space of what was here. I’m not saying the Hikurangi as it was can’t exist in a human place, but there needs to be a place where the two meet. Like a piece of cloth laid on top with no stitching holding it down. It needs a place to anchor it.” He chuckled. “Like a nail.”

_Ping_.

“I guess that’s why you’re going nail-happy.”

Rongo made an indignant  _hurmph_  at her for not properly appreciating his panel work. But his eyes were dark when he jerked his chin towards a heavy beam that needed shifting into place above the makeshift counter.

Tony, taking the hint, hopped off the stepladder and went to pull out her next target from the timber pile. It was a thick trunk of wood, neatly cut and nearly so broad around that Tony couldn’t both hug it and interlock her fingers. It was heavy and solid, the kind of wood that was more unforgiving than steel, more willing to bend under pressure rather than break and more likely to splinter tools than give. With a flex of her knees, Tony swung it up and over her head, balancing it carefully with both hands as she eyed the junction it needed to slot into.

Piece of cake. Heavy, splintery, woody cake, but cake nonetheless.

Actually, that sounded like it would be really hard to eat. Hm. Bad metaphor.

Anyway, her strength had been tested in the past few weeks and this was nothing. She bet she didn’t even need to transform to get enough stability, and  _that_  was creepy as all get-out just about as much as it was ungodly cool.

Her strength definitely had limits- she had started scratching them when she tried taking on multiple loads—they just weren’t  _anywhere_  near  _human_  limits. She could groan about Rongo’s tight lips and empty pockets that had led to free iwi auta labor, but she was selfishly grateful for the opportunity to adjust her picture of the world in the terms of what was and wasn’t possible.

Though she was definitely practicing her world of cardboard speech if she ever accidently hurt someone. She was trying not to think about where the durability of flesh settled in the new order.

Okay. Biting the bullet time. Deep breath.

            “What I wanted to tell you,” Tony huffed as she lifted the beam, “Was that Hinewai and I might be gone for the weekend. Maybe a bit longer. She’s, um, going to meet my mum.”

Rongo merely hummed acknowledgement. Tony could see him shuffling work schedules around in his head, and pointedly ignoring the effort Tony went to slipping it in as casually as possible.

Able to be  _lifted_  didn’t necessarily mean easy to  _carry_ , and the manaia perched on a leaning support squawked in alarm as Tony’s beam swung past its face. Feeling her cheeks warm, Tony squeaked out an apology, and the beam settled heavily into place with a  _thunk_.

There was a brief pause in the  _ting, ting, ting_.

“Raw food only, Tony.”

“I know, Rongo.”

“Does your mum?”

“Yes, Rongo.”

            She didn’t get any more support than a brief grunt, which was probably to be expected, but it made Tony feel better, anyway. You had to read between the lines a lot with Rongo, but if he disapproved, this was probably something he’d speak up about.

            Lightened with that thought, she had three more beams slotted into place when the faint music outside (sometimes there among the murmuring sounds of passerby outside, and sometimes along palm branches rubbing against each other and the whirr of the electric sander) petered silent and Hinewai came inside, hair wild and tangled from the wind and her mouth swollen. She went straight for the pile of water bottles on the coffee-crate counter, and took several long drafts before coming up for air. For the record, Tony did not stare where her lips were wrapped around the neck of the bottle, because she was working. …More than a teensy bit. It was just a bit of wood, it wouldn’t mind her divided attention.

            Hinewai swept out of her range of vision. Most of the workers had gone back to discuss things on the roof, and with a lack of anything more interesting to watch, Tony sighed and went back to nudging timber into place- before a white, windswept head popped up on the other side of her load.

            Tony grinned.

            “I would think you’d have finished setting these by now,” Hinewai said crossly.

            “Hey, cutie! You need to move, I don’t want to crush anything.”

            Hinewai just propped up her elbows onto the beam, pale eyebrows lowered as she fixed Tony with the beady glare of an irritated seagull.

“Aw. Are you still upset because you didn’t get to ravish me?”

“I want to ravish you  _now_.” Hinewai grumbled. Tony huffed and hefted the beam onto a shoulder. Hinewai scrambled to perch on top of the beam as it swung, and Tony just carried her along with it. Serves her right, little white-monkey.

“Patience- is a virtue!” The beam slid into place with a  _thunk_ , and where she sat, Hinewai’s toes now hung several feet off the ground. She seemed unaffected.  “No funny business on construction sites.”

“It’s a  _stupid_  rule.”

“Hine, I like you very much, but some of this equipment is not meant to be near soft bits, and I don’t want anyone to lose any fingers.”

Hinewai’s grin turned vindictive.  

Tony knew exactly what was coming, as soon as she said it, so she rolled her eyes and flicked Hinewai’s nose, since she still hadn’t gotten off her beam despite the threat of being crushed between it and the wall.

“Any _more_.”

The stepladder creaked as Rongo started to step down, and Hinewai blanched, scrambling to get her feet back on the floor. With one hand, she attempted to flatten her windblown hair. Tony fought the urge to giggle. It was probably not the greatest idea to think of Rongo as a more irritable version of her grandfather, who had once helped two twelve-year olds preform funeral rites for a duckling they found on their porch. But Tony could probably twist a length of steel into an anchor hitch, and that made pretty much  _everyone_  seem less intimidating.

Rango put the remaining nails into a tin waiting on the floor, before stepping back to inspect his work.

With a sigh, he turned his sun-marked head to the two of them, dark eyes queer and hard to read even in a way that neither Hinewai’s nor Whais’ had been. He cleared his throat, the rumble like grain in a thresher.

 “If it's ever needed,” he said, voice low, so the other workers couldn’t hear. “I would like to say. That my doors will always be open for you two. This is not an easy time, and I want you to know I don’t blame either of you for what happened. It was regrettable, but there are more old debts at play in the world than you could be responsible for.”

Hinewai shifted behind Tony. Tony ignored her.

“It’s not your fault, either, Rongo.”

Hinewai’s hand carefully tugged her elbow in the sense that probably meant  _he’s a very very old and powerful godlike inhuman figure and he really doesn’t need your reassurance because you’re a very tiny breakable mortal_ , but even a prime minister or an ancient agricultural god could think stupid self-thoughts sometimes.

Rongo, however, just tightened his mouth and turned away, looking back up at his completed panel.

The patterns were deceptively simple, but scored deep. With the nails gleaming at the points of flame, it portrayed the smoke of H burning, curling, the cracking walls. A figure at the center, face unmarked and hands alight.

“First of twenty.” He said soberly.

First of twenty story-telling panels. Symbolic nails? Though if you asked Tony, she thought that maybe it wasn’t just a nail. Maybe it was a buffer. Another layer of protection against a world that burned.

The forest kept on trying to creep in, to build in its own way, greedy for the sun and power of a patch of nostalgic, wild consciousness, fed by the hope of the inhuman, life begetting life. But it had to be held back until they built a proper trellis for it, a frame that it could flourish on, that would blacken but not burn. A patch of nature living in walls made of twisted metal and wood. Roots curling into the carvings and creating new pictures, a new history that would set restrictions on how they met in the place between the city and the mountain.  _Never one thing only_ , right, Whai? What sort of things would Whai have seen the new Hikurangi was becoming?

One thing was for sure.

They might splinter themselves putting it up, but someone’d get a hell of a lot more splinters if they tried to tear it down.

 

The cotton’s rough against his cheek. The sheets were tight across his back and his toes could curl without leaving a night-long halo of warmth. Heavy and set and comfortable. Warm in the way that meant morning is out there, and it’s cold, and he didn’t have to face it yet. A headache that wasn’t completely formed yet, and wouldn’t as long as he kept still. Dark. Quiet.

The smell of coffee.

Coffee?

Steffan opened one bleary eye to a slit of shaggy blonde hair, going dark at the roots again, a gleaming red-rimmed eye, and a bent nose, eclipsed by the blue horizon of his bedspread.

He gave it an investigative grunt.

“Your class is in two hours.”

Grunts seem like good replies. Saint knows how to translate grunts.

“Your morning routine takes fifteen minutes. Less, if some other altruistic individual makes your coffee for you.” Saint said plaintively.

 The smell of coffee swelled again. Saint’s sleeve flapping? Suppose it’s as good a fan to waft the smell towards him as any.

Saint didn’t even make himself coffee, most mornings. The effort should be rewarded.

Steffan shifted at least enough to peel his face off the sheets and peered at the large mug that Saint was, sure enough, holding aloft, with a sloppy smiley face drawn on in whipped cream.

Too bright. Mornings should be illegal.

Steffan groped for it blindly. It took a couple seconds of balancing to sip, coffee threatening to spill over the rim, but it was bitter and seared down his throat, and he fought off coughing because boiling liquid up the nasal cavities was an astonishingly bad idea.

Absolutely perfect.

He took a deeper swallow for the swell of heat and caffeine to sink in. If he was lucky, it would abate the morning headache some. Knowing he wouldn’t get any more prepared than that, he sighed and finally rolled completely upright to eye Saint with narrow-eyed scrutiny.

Saint, knowing he had earned his cue, perked up.  Both hands folded precisely before his chest like nicotine-stained devotee standing before a smokeshop, he cooed, “Hello, darling Steffan, light of my life, provider of food and entertainment, astonishingly boring rule-abiding caterpillar- ”

Going on too long. Grunt.

 “Well, you see, my pet, woe was I, up and about at seven in the A.M. Picture: no one’s about but my lonely crippled self, and the world was cold and empty and  _so. Boring_.”

Oh, there’s the headache. “Is anything on fire?”

Steffan winced immediately. That was bad wording. Thankfully, Saint ignored him.

“All the programs on the set are people tittering about genetics tests and global warming, and you  _like_  your kitchen, so I  _suppose_  I better not stress-bake. And all of the books you have might have pictures, but they’re pictures of incomprehensible physics things which make the words even more confusing.”

            Saint gave him a filthy look, because keeping textbooks after you’ve finished with the course was a fatal personality flaw.  

“You ruined  _picture books_ , Steffan. Is nothing safe? Are you going to tell the good night kiwi that it can’t wish us well unless it’s evening in  _all_  area codes?”

Steffan took another sip and waved him along. Saint was warming up to his finale.

“But then-  _but then_ -“ Saint went breathless, hand clasped to his breast. He looked up at the gently glowing fire detectors and spotted ceiling with awe.

“I found my media salvation, the perfect distraction, the morning ritualistic confection, and though I  _loathe_  to play into masculine sterotypes-“

Saint brought a PS4 game case from behind the back of his tattered dressing gown and wriggled his eyebrows, as though nothing in the universe would prepare Steffan for the sheer entertainment of... _Midnight Victoria No GoGo_? That was a very anime cover. Huh.

Steffan wiped whipped cream from his nose.

“But what tragedy! A twist of the knife! To my lonely, one-player self, lo and behold, the game is  _two player.”_  He said, voice mournful, arms collapsing to clasp the game to his chest.

Steffan pulled the rest of the way out from under the cover and yawned, his jaw cracking. Right, talking. “Sure. Just let me get dressed and I can get set up in a minute.”

He swung his legs over. Saint only went through all this because he did not actually know how to use anything more complicated than the toaster in this house. Not that Steffan really did, either. The combination of buttons seemed to change every time. But he was grateful that Saint had finally decided that there was a better mode of action to take then pressing every button at once to see what happens. That was a job for a physicist.

Saint cheerfully flapped at his gown in victory. The edges of the gown fluttered around his legs like wings as he plopped onto the bed. He had picked up the balding, patched thing somewhere or other and Steffan itched to toss it out, even if this was as close Saint could cheat wearing his trench coat inside and the way he swung it about like a personal extension of his body language was endearing. Mostly because he only meant to do it about half the time.  It made it easier to tell when he was lying about finishing the milk.  

With a huff, Steffan knelt and started in shuffling papers into his backpack. If he didn’t get everything ready to grab rushing out of the door, he would probably tear something important in half, and the first day of the semester wasn’t exactly the greatest day to do that.

Nothing too casual, for the first day, which means a button-down and Saint moaning about elbow patches. That’s fine. Actually wearing elbow patches would draw looks. Black jeans, if they were going to be playing video games, and they look close enough to slacks to be fine. 

Steffan glanced over his shoulder to his bed, where…there was Saint, still sitting, politely alert.

“Saint.” Steffan said patiently.

“I can wait!”

“Saint, I’m not getting dressed with you right there.”

“Are you afraid I’m going to deflower you, pet?”

But it was paired with a pathetic look that meant it was a losing battle, so Steffan just sighed and tugged his sleeping shirt off. Saint made a wounded noise when he reached for the hanger of a white shirt.

Steffan rolled his eyes pointedly at him and touched the next one over.

“Meh.” 

“Ugh.”

Steffan glared at him pointedly and grabbed a hanger at random.

Saint just made an exaggerated face.

“I’m not going to go to college half-naked, so why don’t you just tell me which you approve of?”

Saint just jerked his head to the left, and Steffan ran his hand along the edge of the closet with a sigh. Saint beamed and pointed at one end and Steffan actually looked at the closet to see what his hand had landed on.

It was a bright red, but otherwise plain. Probably part of a monocolor pack he had bought at one point.

“Seriously?”

“You need some color.”

“I’m pretty sure this can be seen from space.”

He did end up wearing the red shirt, but threw on a grey cardigan over it just to spite Saint. Or at least for the sake of sensitive satellite imagery. 

In the kitchen, Saint sucked at his teeth, rocking back and forth on his heels. Up way too early  _and the man who did this was_ \- ow. His head pounded wetly behind his eyes.

“In my defense-“

“Saint, the instant I become a Law major, you can rattle off the most beautiful defense that has ever made an eye in the courtroom weep, but until then, please do not defend yourself to me.”

Creamer. Did they have any creamer? Saint made coffee that tasted like tar and licorice, which was alarming, because Steffan didn’t remember buying any syrups and he hadn’t noticed anything culture-like growing in the coffee machine yet.

Ah, yes. Behind the mixing bowls.

“ _In my defense_ ,” Saint continued loudly, never one to let intentions get in the way of a good speech, “You really only need four hours of sleep, when you think about the time zones of things. If we lived on south island, only three. Honestly, the health-problems of oversleep are  _extraordinary._  You’re lucky you haven’t dropped dead.”

Steffan reached up to ruffle his hand through Saint’s hair. Saint’s mouth snapped shut. Steffan took another sip, one eyebrow raised, until it was clear Saint was pacified. Like grabbing a kitten by the scruff of its neck, really.

Validated, Steffan hummed and turned away to fix his coffee. “You need to get a haircut. You look like Shaggy.”

“Is there something wrong with shaggy?” Saint asked cheerfully. “I’m okay with shaggy, shaggy is tres chic, post-apocolyptic hobo is in now.”

“No, you look like Shaggy. Zoinks. Have a Scooby snack. It was Mr. Jenkins.”

Which, of course, set off a discussion of who, exactly, Steffan was, and Saint contemplated the possible values of Velma and Daphne in length while, like clockwork, Steffan set two pieces of bread in the toaster to toast. And, like clockwork, Saint stole one away somewhere in-between the buttering process and jam. His vendetta against fruit evidently extended even when it was saturated in sugar.

            Punk.

It was only when they had settled on the couch and Saint was fiddling with the entertainment system that Steffan focused on what was on the screen properly.

 “Hold on. Is this a dating sim?”

“Oi, I’ve already done my speech. It’s your job now.”

“Saint. A  _two person_  dating sim?”

Saint grinned.

 “I need the life advice. If I didn’t have you to help me, oh-wise-and-scholarly one, who knows who I might date? A drop-dead gorgeous supermodel? A rockstar? These aren’t reliable date options for helping me do taxes and put up white picket fences. Guitars make for  _terrible_  hammers.”

Steffan groaned and dropped the controller.

That didn’t make sense. Except it did, and had for way too long.

“Where the hell did you even find this?” It certainly wasn’t his.

“Well, there was a little shop on the streetcorner that wasn’t there a week ago. And, come to think of it, wasn’t there again yesterday…”

Saint giggled madly, and then abruptly sat up.

“No, wait! Steff, come back! I’m joking, it was bargain bin; it’s fun, I promise!”

 

They ended up playing the dating sim for five minutes before Steffan came to the end of his tolerance for innuendos. Then he dug up a two-person fighter and there was a blissful hour of mind-numbing cartoon violence only broken by Saint attempting to rename all of the special attacks. By ‘mushroom punchy megapunch’, Saint was running out of material, and Steffan had paused the game to get ready to leave.

“I’ll see you after work. Try not to insult the game until it refuses to stop working.”

“Steff?”

Steffan paused in pulling his jacket on. “Yeah?”

Saint bit his lip, still watching the paused screen. It was impossible for Saint to hide anything without fronting. If you could fit an encyclopedia on one of those wildly flapping blow-up things in front of car dealerships, that was Santiago Fletcher’s poker face.

“Nothing. S’not important. See you after work.”

He really was going to be late. He hesitated, glanced quickly at the clock.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,”

“Is it the nightmares again?”

“Nah,” He gave a snort, flippant this time, the kind of self-deriving tone that meant at least it was technically true.

Saint would still be here to talk to when he got home. He would. Steffan took a deep breath, but decided to let it go.

 “All right.” He pulled his jacket all the way on and grabbed his bag.

Saint grinned at him faintly from the futon. “See you later. Should probably have to- yeah, get ready for work.” The sounds of the game resumed as Steffan closed the door.

The trolley ride seemed quieter than normal that morning.

 

 

 

It was technically more frantic packing for a weekend than it should have been. Hinewai’s current binge, a romantic sitcom marathon, was playing a little too loudly over the noise of Tony ripping off packing tape to re-enforce the piles of boxes that were scattered across her kitchen. One stack was only kept from toppling over because she had it wedged between her foot and the wall.

But then again, a Moana weekend varied in length from two to five days. A Moana weekend required an  _entirely_  different level of planning. Tony had a Tupperware set that needed to be given back to her Aunt Maia, and her cousin Brooke would want to look over the paperwork from the past few years of her taxes, and if she didn’t pack a dress, her Aunt Lucy would fuss, and she had her step-nephew’s tin of guitar picks around here somewhere, and Rangi would want to get a hold of all of her back issues of the new 52, and her mom would pitch a fit if she didn’t bring her at least a box of her business cards to hand out- maybe copies of her resume, too, because she didn’t see a boat coming out of nowhere anytime soon.

Hinewai patiently handed her items from the incredible lack of information Tony was able to muster. The Moanas didn’t own things communally, per se, but there were pots and pans still being passed around from family member to family member that predated Bill Rowling. They maintained a complex rhythm of negotiations of who owed whom what, and the aunties had been delighted when her cousin Hana had joined the police force in Hamilton, despite her protests that being a beat cop had little to no overlap with forensic analysis.

 It was still a family quest to find who, exactly, now had possession of the green knife-sharpener.

Tony was half-dictating her planned debriefing in her head as she worked.  Well, her boat had been destroyed, and her company had gone under, and she was currently living on her savings. But she did have a girlfriend, and she didn’t have scurvy, so how bad could it turn out? Because if it  _did_  turn out, then Hinewai would be family.

Or at least, in the family system. And opinions in the family traveled around like Tupperware. There were still stories about Hana’s boyfriend of five years ago, and the aunties were no doubt the reason they broke up. And Tai’s girlfriend was still invited to holiday dinners even though she and Tai had stopped seeing each other ages ago.

Family was- family was everything.

Family was why she had never felt a lack, not even when her da wasn’t there anymore. Rangi told her stories, and mum gave her old journals to read, and in bits and pieces, sometimes as an aside in the middle of something else, disjointed, until she could piece together a family history that stretched back, back, and down into the ground through her toes. Family was just a thing you lived in, like air, a full dozen cousins and half-siblings and houses with unlocked doors and your choice of beds to sleep in, a full-fledged world in and of itself twisting in and out of history and into the future.

And having Hinewai there would be- there was a skip in her mental rhythm, there, because when she moved to Wellington, it was… different.

When she wasn’t sure of something in the city, she brought it home. With her business degree, and her first breakup, and when she was trying to find her second apartment and shopping for boats.

But when Tony had set her bags down in her own, tiny flat, the heartstrings connecting her to the houses in Queenstown and Otago and the lakehouse in Hawke’s Bay had drawn taunt. And it had stretched, because Wellington had a history, busy wildly growing history that wasn’t, couldn’t be connected to hers, and she needed to make room for it. And that was exhilarating, exciting, like falling in love for the first time.

And Hinewai was Wellington, all the parts of Wellington that Tony loved, even though she shouldn’t, because really they were awful. The rain and the wind and the carelessness of passerby and the unfeeling nature of the city and the vicious curiosity in ripping apart new things and the violent vibrancy of art and politics. The slog and the traffic and the sparkle of broken glass.

When Hinewai left Wellington and stepped into her mental Hawke’s Bay, the image couldn’t mesh. Tony couldn’t align them on top of each other.

She had a feeling she wouldn’t find out what it looked like until they were actually there.

Tony  _trusted_  Hinewai. Hinewai would find a way, because Hinewai had figured out the buttons on her TV and how to order takeout with impeccable manners without ever having to ask Tony. And she could almost answer the door without making the super flinch.

The fact that she couldn’t actually picture Hinewai in her parent’s house was… worrying. 

And if Hinewai didn’t mesh, if Hinewai was too distant or if Tony was wrong about her,

if it was too fast and Hinewai just wasn’t human enough to find the same things she did, if her mum heard the word ‘mindfuck’ and asked for an explanation and if all of Tony’s justifications in her head about how it was fine to date someone with mind control didn’t hold any water-

But…

But if it turned out, then Hinewai would be  _family_. And then none of the other things would matter.

She was also possibly worried that Hinewai did not exactly understand the severity of the situation.

“Is it the blue one?” Hinewai asked doubtfully. There were two calendars in her hands, one the yellow, chipped one from aunt May and the other the one shaped like a tulip that Tony had bought from a garage sale last fall.

“That’s the one. Mum saw me post a picture on Facebook and fell over herself about how cute it was. Can you remind me to stop by the chocolate factory before we leave the city? The chocolate caramel crisp things are Rangi’s favorite, and we should grab him a bag.”

What was she talking about? Hinewai was the  _best_  girlfriend. They were going to be fine. As long as... well, she was getting much better at not being awful. If she bribed Rangi with enough Wellington sweets, they could get him to play interceptor for anything the family could throw at them. Hopefully.

She could take Hinewai to the lake. Catch fish and eat them while they’re still fresh. And help mum make fish and chips and rhubarb pie. Or-what could you make with rhubarb without cooking it? Whatever it was, it’d need to feed everyone who was in the house at the time, because one kid coming home meant everyone coming over to take tabs on the kid coming home. And the lakehouse was only so big.

Oh god. What if it was Aunt S? She went to America on an exchange student program once and she had come back really judgmental, even if her kids were cool, and if she had sniffed at the gable figure on the top of the pantry, then she would definitely sniff at Tony suddenly knowing a lot about iwi auta all of a sudden. She had a brief thought of turning to entertain her nephews at the lake in retribution, because they would go on and on about dragons for ages- except. Oh, man. How much of her family knew?  How much would she have to hide about the fact that she and her girlfriend weren’t  _human_? Hinewai didn’t even have a background of what she was supposed to act like, she had never been anything but auta, they were going to have to bail it if Rangi lit a match for a fry-up-

_Oh god what if Hinewai was allergic to more human things._ What if one of her cousins fed Hinewai cooked chicken or something?Was there a pharmacy near the lakehouse? Would an antihistamine even help her?

“I’m not going to worry anymore!” Tony said cheerfully. “Everything is going to be fine and my family are going to love you. You are loveable. And it’s a lot more open out there, you might enjoy it more than the city.”

Hinewai just inspected the colander curiously. “No. I am more worried about maero. Your family will be easily dealt with, if everyone can be won over as easily as you are by quoting Seinfeld.”

“It was a long bit!” Tony protested. “It was  _impressive_.”

Hinewai just rose an eyebrow and placed the colander in an awaiting box.

“Interrelational politics are nothing new to me, my love. And while I’m glad you’ve agreed to do a general declaration- I’ve been looking forward to defending my claim.” She grinned viciously, and reached for the packing tape. “But I wish I were better prepared to hunt down any threats in the hills. They might see us as interlopers.”

Just like that, Tony’s bubble of anxiety popped, and she giggled.

“I guess if worst comes to worst, we can tell them you’re an invested LARP player.”

“That game with the soft balls and lightning bolts?”

“Mmhm. Please don’t actually challenge any of my family to trial by combat? I don’t think anyone would escape it without injuring themselves. Except maybe Lea? But I doubt she’d come this time, she’s all the way in the Otago house. And I don’t think the maero should be any problem, unless we seek them out- and even if they attack us, we might not have fire, but Steffan said that you can remove the head. I could deal with them pretty easily.”

Tony mimed a Vulcan Neck-snap. Aw, yeah! Take that, mister maero! Didn’t expect someone to take you out Taniwha style, huh?

She stopped when she caught a glimpse of Hinewai hiding her disappointment in over-aggressively wrapping her box in tape. 

 “Or you can,” Tony amended indulgently, letting her hands drop, and delicately lifting the tape out of Hinewai’s hand. “I’m sure I have a tire iron or something. Or- hold on.”

Hinewai cocked her head in curiosity as Tony dove for her bag. After a bit of hunting, she held up a slip of paper triumphantly.

 “One of Rongo’s employees gave me a list of shops that technically owe us favors for the whole preventing-urban-warfare thing. I think some of them might carry weapons-“

            Hinewai snatched at it, running a finger down the list. “Yes!” she said, smile spreading across her face as she came to a stop at one name. “That will do  _very_  nicely.”

With the look in Hinewai’s face, Tony had no doubt that Hinewai would take great glee in arranging for a whole army of iwi auta to come swarming again so she could clear a path for the two of them to arrive in glory.

It had near enough happened, not too long ago, and she probably would have arrived in  _gory_  rather than glory, but the sincerity was enough to make her heart melt. What a silly Tony she was! Of course Hinewai was going to impress her family one way or the other.

Hinewai wasn’t visiting her family. The Moanas were getting a visit from  _her._

Transportation came in the form of a beaten-up four-door borrowed from a café regular. The regular in question had grinned and clasped her hand a little too long while putting the keys in Tony’s hand, and caught her eye every time Tony made an excuse to leave.

The attention didn’t exactly make Tony feel  _comfortable_ , but bus fares were expensive, airplane fares even more so, and they wouldn’t stop in all the places they needed to, and Hinewai had certainly seemed to have no problem with taking advantage of an admirer. She just poked around a bit in the glovebox before declaring it acceptable.

So Tony didn’t say anything. A few days of borrowing a car is a more than fair exchange for saving everyone’s butts, right?

When they stopped at the shop on Tony’s list, Hinewai primly informed her that it was something that had to be done alone.

            “That’s okay,” Tony said, unhooking her seatbelt to wait. “I have a feeling that if you look at weaponry like you look at flutes, I might feel like a bit of a third wheel.”

            “Hmm. Would a taiaha let me polish it in the morning without complaint?”

            “Maybe, but it wouldn’t make you breakfast unless you paid for cooking classes at the college.”

            An exaggerated sigh of disappointment. “Then you are very safe.” Hinewai leaned across the armrests and kissed her forehead before scrambling out.

            It was a clear day, with good, strong reading light. To pass the time, Tony took out the book she was working on ( _Pierce Locke and the Harpy Coliseum of Hell_  !), before letting herself smile, behind the pages. 

Right around when Pierce Locke was about to be betrayed by his elderly senior officer who was  _transparently_  jealous of his connection with the Harpy princess, and therefore undo all of the progress Pierce Locke had made with the Harpies by winning the sudden death match, Tony heard a hopeful, “I decided that it would be a good idea to bring a gift. For your family. What do you think?”

 “Oh, good idea.” Tony pinned a finger in the book to keep track of where she had stopped and looked up, grinning. “That’d be sweet, H-  _ohgod._ ”

Hanging from Hinewai’s hand was a string of strangled pigeons, held up to the window. So that Tony could better see their little hanging heads, and curled-up scaly feets. Aw. One was still sort of twitching.

Tony forcibly ordered her heart to start beating, and then looked at the offering critically.

“…That might work, actually, with Rangi. “ she said honestly. “He likes barbequing.”

Pigeons probably weren’t the  _healthiest_  things to eat. Then again, Hinewai hadn’t shown any signs of health problems, and she’d been snapping them up for weeks like they were the expensive kind of ice cream bars mispriced for a fourth of the normal price. (Now  _that_  was a happy Tony day.)

They’d probably eaten worse in hotdogs.

“We can put it in the colander.”, she decided.  

Hinewai had a long, sleek length of black-treated wood balanced over one shoulder, with a vicious-looking blade at one end. It was absolutely beautiful and they were absolutely going to have to have a talk about LARPing.

“All set?” Tony asked when Hinewai had climbed back in.

Hinewai nodded, and reached for the radio. Tony slapped her hand away.

“Oi! Winchester rules!”

“Hinewai rules. I refuse to listen to any more Madonna.”

“Don’t diss Madonna!”

            They did finally settle on a radio station some fifty miles later, although there may have been a few civil wars over the dial before Tony pulled into the drive of the lakehouse, carrying in tow a string of freshly-killed pigeons, four days’ worth of clothes, a trunk full of miscellaneous family offerings, and a polished  _tao_  quietly stashed under the back seats, along with a tightly wrapped package that Hinewai refused to let Tony peek at.

            Yay, family weekends!

            Tony felt the first bubbling excitement as she led Hinewai down the drive, suitcases in tow. There was the place she had skidded straight into a tree on her bike when she was ten. And the place where she made Hana swear that she would never, ever become a whale hunter. And the tree that made an amazing reading nook, with stones stored in the hollow knot for holding down comic book pages.

            Hinewai reached out one hand and trailed it along the drooping wisteria that hung above the front door.

            Tony’s mum opened the door before Tony could knock, and beamed.

            “Sweet pea! It’s so good to see you. Can you come in real quick, I think May tried picking up too many bowls and she’s refusing to let any of us help, but you’ve always been her favorite.”

            Tony grinned as her mum enveloped her in a hug, and dropped her bag on the stoop to return it.

            “That’s not subtle, mum, you have to give the shotgun talk with me here so I can make funny faces and undo the whole message.”

            “You say that like I’m not going to get you apart eventually.”

            Beyond her mum’s shoulder, Tony could see Hana, Tai, and Uncle Jay in the living room. Tai gave a wolf-whistle hello, and the other two turned to see what the commotion was. Hana brightened and wriggled her eyebrows suggestively. Then her eyes went to Hinewai, and she turned puzzled. Uncle Jay was subtly leaning, trying to look behind them and down into the drive.

Tony felt a sinking realization.

She tugged her mum on the shoulder.

“You told them Hinewai is a girl, right? Like, told-them told them?” she hissed.

Her mum scoffed, and released her from her hug.

“I’ve been fretting nonstop about where to room you two since we got here, of course they know that-“

She hesitated, face transforming with a sudden realization. 

 “Um.”

She spun around, clapping her hands.

“So!” She said brightly. “Tony’s  _gay_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone thank Shade for being an excellent Beta. This chapter should read a little smoother than the last one.  
> Hope this fulfills my adorable domesticity requirements, because it's Plot from here on out.


End file.
